This article is much longer than I would have liked, yet I wasn’t able to dive into each of the subtopics in as much detail as I would have hoped for. Still, it provides some foundational material for a later examination and proposal for a metaverse implementation. If you are a serious virtual world or metaverse enthusiast, this article is probably for you. The more casual reader may want to skip this article.

If you are involved in a metaverse project, you may find it referenced below. Nothing you read here should be considered a harsh criticism of any one particular approach. In most cases, these implementations are named to illustrate an example or a counter-example. This article doesn’t attempt to perform a complete review of platforms or to call winners.

INTRODUCTION

Previously, we identified seven issues which hold back our current metaverse implementations. Can a metaverse actually break through all of these issues to become a major platform?

What if we build on a distributed services architecture? Should we position the desktop client as a 2D/3D content browser? What if we use open standards, or build upon a proven engine? These and other suggestions may turn out to be very good ideas, but we don’t know. We’re still trying to understand the underlying issues which are holding us back.

SPECIFIC PROBLEMS ILLUSTRATE SYSTEMIC ISSUES

Clearly, there are more problems than the original seven which were provided in the first article, but those seven create a pool from which we can look for more systemic issues.

Why do we want to hunt for systemic issues? Efficiency. If we can identify core issues that we want to solve, then addressing one of them can knock out multiple problems. In that pursuit, we’re going to investigate three candidates: management, engine, and scope.

THE SEARCH FOR A SYSTEMIC ISSUE: CENTRAL MANAGEMENT

If there has been a lightning rod for criticism of a metaverse, in both science fiction and the real-world, it has been the idea of centralized management. There are so many aspects of a centralized approach which attract negative attention. Here are a few:

The self-appointed king. When a company (or large organization) starts a metaverse project, they automatically bake in some assumptions. One of them is that they (or a specific technology that they are promoting) will always be at the center of everything. This one assumption guides every design decision which follows, and most often places the needs of the organization before the solution itself. One way this exhibits itself is in a metaverse that is more walled garden than worldwide computer network. In truth, it resonates through the whole design.

Lack of autonomy for participants. The central management usually accepts only a very controlled guidance in the rules which they use to govern their virtual world. At any time and without recourse, they seem to reserve the right to decide that your business is unwanted and to brush you aside. How do you stake your claim in the metaverse if you’re really just building inside someone else’s empire? This is inferior to the Internet experience of staking a claim and setting up your own shop.

Limited (if any) internal competition. The position held by a central organization means that while they may see competition from the outside, they do not see competition from inside their world. There are no competing organizations which are trying to build better in-world services such as marketplaces, land ownership, graphical standards, and search functions. You’re stuck with whatever they provide, at the pace that they provide it, at the cost they charge for it.

Local restrictions become global. A metaverse that is controlled in India would likely ban pornography (as would many other countries). A metaverse that is controlled in the United States would likely ban in-world gambling. (In fact, Second Life went through the effort of removing all gambling a number of years ago.) A metaverse that is controlled in a number of other countries would ban insulting royalty or heads of state. This is not to suggest that we should reject lawful restrictions in the jurisdictions which they apply. While we acknowledge that this is a complex issue, at a minimum, a centrally organized metaverse would be expected to globally implement the laws they inherit from their own jurisdiction. To the majority of online users, this represents a problem. Today’s Internet does not globally apply the laws from a single jurisdiction, and the metaverse should not do so either.

It is worth noting that High Fidelity is at least opening the door to outside competition in some of their core services (possibly the nameserver, marketplace, and currency server). They believe that they can continue to provide the best services in the face of potential or realized competition from the outside.

OpenSimulator (based on the Second Life engine) represents a group of interconnected worlds which is no longer under the control of Linden Labs. They saw some success, but the odd thing is, if central management was the problem, then why didn’t OpenSimulator spread like wildfire and take over the virtual world? As it turns out, there is more than one systemic issue to deal with.

THE SEARCH FOR A SYSTEMIC ISSUE: THE WORLD ENGINE

The search for a systemic issue led us to the world engine. The world engine is just a convenient label to reference the sum of the overall design, protocol, back-end servers, databases, and client software. If that scope seems unwieldy, just focus on the client-side software.

Trade-offs in the underlying language. The selection of the underlying language has a massive impact on a platform’s characteristics. Do you choose the language which will be less vulnerable to exploitation, or the one which will attract the most developers? Most platforms will choose the language which favors a larger developer population. How far can you trust a platform which is built upon “the perfect mix of unsafe and easy to abuse” for purchases, secure communications, or to check on your home automation system?

A single engine. Almost all metaverse implementations are based around a single world engine. (It is unusual to see multiple engines with truly diverse functionality operating within the same metaverse.) Everything that you can see or do is channeled through the engine. These engines are often geared towards bandwidth optimization, navigation, in-world communication activities, in-world transactions, and in-world building. They tend to be poorly suited for other tasks, for example, twitch-based action, or cryptographically secure communications, and real-world financial transactions. The metaverse should be capable of so much more.

A ceiling for creativity. In a virtual world, the first tier of creativity, and the most obvious, belongs to the builders of in-world environments. The second tier of creativity is for those people who play in the environment and act out their own stories in the virtual world (the inhabitants, or role-players in some contexts). We often overlook the the third tier of creativity, which is in the structure imposed by the world engine itself. As an example, you may want unvisited areas in your creation to be shrouded in a fog of war. If the platform you are using prevents this, it limits your creativity. The engine itself is often an unappreciated but important contributor (or impediment) to the creative process.

A ceiling for technology. The world specification and the implementation of the client engine sets the limit on the technological limits of a metaverse. This limitation explains everything from dated graphics to the lack of modern features (such as real-time streaming of positional sensors onto avatars). The ceiling must constantly be raised and the scope must constantly be expanded to incorporate new features. At the same time, compatibility must be maintained, which creates friction.

High costs and limited risk taking. The aspect of central management mixed with a single world engine usually results in a large implementation. With a single large implementation, the direct and indirect costs of making changes are high. A large implementation also limits the amount of risk taking (in terms of technical innovation and design innovation) that is done in a metaverse, for fear of upsetting an existing population of users. The problem only becomes more pronounced as the number of users increase. Increasing costs usually yield technical stagnation in the long-term, which reduces the value of the platform.

The current generation of metaverse implementations seem to show some appreciation for engine-based limitations.

VRChat allows developers to create shared content through the well-known Unity game engine. When players enter VRChat and select a destination, the area is dynamically loaded and pulled under the existing structure of VRChat’s shared universe. Updates to the Unity engine are regularly provided by Unity Technologies and new plugins are available from third parties. Using a well known engine may not solve every problem, but it seems a more efficient choice than rolling your own engine and keeping it fresh.

JanusVR deviates from the standard engine with their MMOB (massively multiplayer online browser) design. They run a custom engine which is based on the concept of connected rooms. Users build and then host the contents of their own room on the open web. JanusVR has its own room definition language, but they have demonstrated that they are able to incorporate externally created technologies, such as SceneVR.

I think that we are starting to see the benefits of new approaches in this area.

THE SEARCH FOR A SYSTEMIC ISSUE: WORLD SCOPE

Finally, the search for a systemic issue led us to issues of scope. Metaverse implementations have exhibited a number of scope issues, including:

Walled garden. It certainly isn’t a path to the metaverse, but walled gardens are commonly found in metaverse implementations. You either build your virtual world inside of their platform, or not. The platform never tries to reach out to external virtual worlds or communities to bring them into a greater whole. Part of this is due to the central management, part of this is due to intricate details of the world engine. It is a shame, because it fragments both users and content.

Never quite reaching reality. Aside from divorcing themselves from other virtual worlds, metaverse implementations have a habit of divorcing themselves from the real world, too. There was a time where you could visit the American Apparel store in Second Life. Could you buy an in-world shirt for your avatar? Sure. But if you wanted to browse their selection and buy one of their real world shirts, the best you could do was access an in-world web browser window and shop in 2D. This is not unlike the 1990s Internet where businesses would put up a web page with some basic information and ask people to call them on the phone if they wanted anything more (such as support documentation, or to make a purchase). It is a missed opportunity of massive proportions.

The latest generation of metaverse implementations seem to be taking on the issue of scope in different ways.

High Fidelity is opening the door to outside competition in some of their core services (nameserver, marketplace, currency server). They believe that they’ll be able to provide the best services under the process of potential (or realized) outside competition.

Most of the remaining metaverse implementations seem to have the potential to allow interaction with real-world systems (beyond presenting a web browser interface), but I haven’t yet stumbled across any significant examples of real-world utility. It may be worthwhile for them to demonstrate the capability with a few examples.

ARRIVING AT THE SYSTEMIC FAILURE

So when we look at the systemic issues in metaverse implementations, it really is a combination of all three (management, engine, scope). Some of these issues impact certain implementations more than others.

As I worked through these systemic issues, I made one important observation: choices which unite are also choices that exclude. Every decision that is made by central management is a choice that in-world developers cannot make for themselves. We’re baking a ton of choices into most of these implementations.

Are centralized choices actually good or bad, and why? It depends on the goal that you are trying to achieve. We’ll revisit the impact of centralized choices again when we dive into a specific metaverse proposal.

The next article in this series will define what the Metaverse is, explain the purpose it serves in the real-world, and show the applications that can be made to take advantage of it. It should also put you in a position to start thinking about how we actually build the metaverse, which will be explored in more detail in upcoming articles.

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https://metaversing.com/2015/06/13/systemic-issues-in-metaverse-implementations/feed/0jmccormImage Source: Intland Software, Using Root Cause Analysis to Drive Process ImprovementHow do you Solve the Metaverse Problem?https://metaversing.com/2015/04/24/how-do-you-solve-the-metaverse-problem/
https://metaversing.com/2015/04/24/how-do-you-solve-the-metaverse-problem/#respondSat, 25 Apr 2015 04:06:59 +0000http://metaversing.com/?p=2687When you meet someone who has a metaverse or virtual world project, ask them what they’re creating. If their answer is something like, “I’m creating a engine in C++ that uses a distributed computing to present an interactive world that is defined by point clouds”, they’ve only described their solution. Do you fully understand the problem that they’re solving? More important: do they?

An artist’s interpretation of the Systems Engineering process. Source: Penn State Lunar Lion Team

I came across a great quote about systems engineering at Wikipedia. “The systems engineering process must begin by discovering the real problem that needs to be solved; the biggest failure that can be made in systems engineering is finding an elegant solution to the wrong problem.” When we’re making a Metaverse, what is it that we’re trying to solve?

When I read the quote above, it resonated with me. Why don’t we make a fresh attempt to start with needs and then work towards a technical solution? Who’s problems are we trying to solve, what are they, and how important at they?

We are going to try to understand the needs behind something that is very thorny: a metaverse project.

It is worth pointing out that even though we’ll start our focus with needs and we’ll end up at solutions, we’re still following the same path that has been made many times before us. We’re going into this by saying that our solution is a metaverse. The only uncertainty is what form that metaverse will take.

The mistake? We’re defining the problem in terms of a solution. At least this time we recognizing that fact up-front. Perhaps this illustrates yet another reason why the very attempt to intentionally create a metaverse can result in its failure.

Now, back to determining needs…

The Users

To understand the needs that drive a metaverse, we could start by asking people what they want or need in their everyday life. (Finding an expert summary would make more sense.) It might be hard to turn their answers into something useful, but I think there is a lot of insight into basic human needs and desires that shouldn’t be easily dismissed. I’m reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but I find myself to be critical of that approach.

At the other end of the spectrum, we could find people who already know what a metaverse is, and we can ask them what they hope to do there and get out of the experience. Their answers are going to be much more specific and easily turned into goals… but we also have to be aware that the kind of people who know what a metaverse is may not be representative of a larger online world.

We should look at existing and previous virtual worlds (Second Life is a big one) and see what experiences people really liked, and why. We should make note of them. We should also take the opportunity to find out what they didn’t like, and why.

Finally, we look at what real-word activities provide value to people. What works? What doesn’t work? If we’re going to be building a world in a virtual environment, we better have a good idea of what currently works and doesn’t work in the real world, for who, and why.

To recap, we ask people what they’re interested in, and then we find out more about their activities. We look at the virtual world, and we look at the real world. As we do so, we need to observe from a broad social perspective, but we also zoom in and look at it from an individual level.

When you put the data together, I hope that you come to the same conclusion as I have: a successful metaverse should be capable of meeting enough of the needs and desires, both broad and specific, of a large section of the entire population. Pause a minute to digest that and reflect on the list below.

Learning about ostriches, gossip, mindless entertainment, relaxation, building a company, vanity, competitive sport, love, shopping for a better pair of shoes, education, building a fan base, religion, creating a poem, telling a secret in private, domination, public performances, saying goodbye.

This isn’t technical stuff, and I suspect that I might have lost a few of you, so let me drive it all back home. See all those items in the box above? That is just a small sample of all things that people will want to do in the metaverse. You know what else is true? Those are all things that people are already doing on the Internet today.

So now you see the scope of the problem. What do people want from the metaverse? Everything. That’s all. You’ll never be able to directly satisfy it all by yourself.

Image Source: T.J. Sullivan Student Leadership Blog

This is the point where a developer might say, “You know what? I’m just going to build my interactive point-cloud virtual world and see where it goes from there.” I don’t blame them. But they should at least figure out who they are going to be solving problems for, what those problems are, and how important they are.

You shouldn’t need to write down the sum of the human experience. If you made some effort towards this, you should probably focus on real and virtual world activities, and go through in your mind how they’d work out. Later, this becomes an excellent tool for when you want to flesh out design specifics.

How might you cultivate one particular commercial area with artistic quality buildings and prevent a first-time designer putting up a shack or a house? You might start with how they took care of that in other virtual worlds, like Second Life. (Answer: it would be up to the land owner to enforce.) You could also ask yourself how they handle that problem in the real world. (Answer: zoning.)

The Platform

To move forward on a metaverse project, the most obvious conclusion would be that you need to build a general-purpose machine… a large underlying platform. You would expect for others to build on top of your platform to create the virtual world experiences that people want and need.

Now that you’ve identified a new group of people who have a stake in your project (the developers, experience builders, or advanced users), you’re going to have to figure out their needs and how far you’re going to go in order to make them successful. Technical requirements? Documentation? Financial motivation? Trust in you?

You’ll also need to figure out how you’re going to prioritize their needs. Is your primary focus really on the users, the developers, or yet another group?

One of the greatest challenges may be meeting the expectations of developers and users alike. I think we’ve covered expectations in terms of needs and activities, but what about technological expectations?

Features found in existing applications are going to drive people to want the same things they are doing today, and at the same level of quality. Are you ready to create a back-end capability which simultaneously supports a shared movie experience, twitch-based action, secure communications, live performances, building objects from in-world, and a player inventory filled with functional items?

More directly: can your world simultaneously enforce conflicting goals, like the real-time requirements of twitch-based action, while simultaneously supporting situations which require the fairness of time dilation? What if we add in the requirements of a secure communications channel which brings some additional latency?

Let’s look at the front-end code for your metaverse client. The same questions apply, and more. Will your movie experience be as good as a stand-alone one? What are the challenges over time in extending the platform to support new functionality?

The Business

You’re also probably going to decide that you need the financial backing of a large company to create this great platform. If so, we’ve got to examine the needs of this large company and roll that into our metaverse requirements as well.

Risk, return on investment, cash flow, shareholder sentiment, competition. You have a limited runway to get the project in the air. You have user counts and revenue goals that you have to meet. You’ve got to design your metaverse in a way that you can make a profit. You have to roll all of this into your initial design and prioritize these needs, too.

If you’re lucky, you might just have an existing system to lean on. (I think that if Valve is creating a metaverse, their existing infrastructure provides much of this.) On the other hand, if you have a patient partner, you might be able to create a metaverse without too many up-front business concerns. What if you could build a metaverse today, and worry about monetizing it later down the road?

That is one way that the arrangement between Oculus and Facebook could work out… but I don’t see Facebook being hands-off for too long. It is also the way it would work if you’re building a metaverse in hopes of being acquired by another company (“bake and flip”). The business side may not be a problem that you have to solve right away.

If you have not already, you should already recognize that not all the needs that you’ll have to address are technical. These other issues need just as much of your attention.

Image: Artist Sylvie Fleury, “Yes to All”, 2009

The Big Problem

We’ve made a first pass at developing a list of needs. You might also be starting with out with other requirements, constraints, and pre-existing choices. Now we’ve got some tough decisions to make. How you turn these needs into solutions is critical. Do you sit down and start with priorities and design compromises? Try to tackle everything at once? Start small and build out from there?

If you were Valve, perhaps you would consider reducing the problem by addressing a subset of it. Trim the fat. Could you build a shared entertainment universe instead of a full-blown metaverse?

Here is my suggestion: put a stake in the ground and take a stab at a design. See if you can figure out the different ways that it would play out, and for all the involved parties. Try to understand it from different angles. As you go, make note of the rough spots in the design.

Many of you have at one time or another refactored your code, but what if we use that same process before we even write our first line of code? Try your hand at refactoring the design. Find your common elements. Look for efficiencies. Is there a different way to get to the result that you’re looking for? Are you focused on the right thing? Can you solve a different problem instead, and still arrive at an equivalent answer?

If building a metaverse was just a technical problem, it already would have been done by now (or we could have fixed someone else’s broken implementation). It isn’t. A metaverse is a design problem first. Due to its complexity, it has to be addressed from a holistic perspective. It is a modern-day Apollo program; it is a systems engineering problem.

The next article should be pretty basic, but fairly unique. It will focus on current-day observations and updated beliefs in metaverse design.

It was a short piece, mostly referencing an email from Fabian Giesen, a demoscene coder (and more) who was doing some VR work at Valve as a contractor. I’ll be honest, his message was a real downer for me, and I had my own Notch moment. Why was I working towards something that, if successful, would ultimately be used just to provide value to Facebook?

Over the past nine months, a surprising number of you have told me how those early Metaverse articles had actually been very helpful to you. A few of you said that you had a Metaverse effort going, but most of you were creating multiplayer virtual environments. Thank you all for your feedback and support!

I think the moment that it all crystallized and brought me back to Metaversing was seeing the return of Valve with the HTC Vive. Suddenly, it seemed like there were possibilities once again. Thanks, Gabe. I’m looking forward to learning more about your shared entertainment universe… perhaps a non-traditional Metaverse?

As I look back over last year’s body of work, I think most of the pieces have held up well enough. Perhaps the most controversial article was on the Virtual Home. The name, alone, drew an immediate comparison to PlayStation Home (closed in March, 2015), which turns out to be wildly unpopular with VR enthusiasts as the basis for a Metaverse implementation.

PlayStation Home was not where I was heading, so I can agree with much of the upset. Still, the article itself was far too ambitious. I tried to decompress way too many ideas into a short amount of space. I’ve learned my lesson — I’ll try to keep future articles more contained.

The PlayStation Home, now abandoned by Sony

What many of you may not have realized was that most of the articles from last year formed the discrete parts of a global design for a Metaverse. That Metaverse, ultimately, was never described in its entirety. I still have what appears to be a very unique blueprint for a Metaverse that I hope to describe in detail. I’m convinced that this model is not only viable (from multiple vantage points), but that it also has the ability to become wildly successful.

This year I intend to return to my work of laying down more of the design elements and then finally tying it all together. For now, I’ve got to see what happened to some illustrative artwork that was commissioned last year in JanusVR in support of an article I never published. It seems that some of the recent work by Valve (and now Oculus) has made that topic extremely relevant…

]]>https://metaversing.com/2015/04/20/a-review-of-earlier-articles-and-a-return-to-metaverse-issues/feed/0jmccormThe PlayStation Home, now abandoned by SonyCompetitors with Different Goals: Valve versus Oculushttps://metaversing.com/2015/03/20/competitors-with-different-goals-valve-versus-oculus/
https://metaversing.com/2015/03/20/competitors-with-different-goals-valve-versus-oculus/#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 14:45:09 +0000http://metaversing.com/?p=1487The recently announced HTC Vive looks to be a strong technology competitor against the highly anticipated consumer release from Oculus in the PC space. While Oculus has long-ago stated that they are working to deliver their consumer VR headset at a lower margin, possibly even at cost, HTC/Valve has announced their entry of a premium VR experience.

A Different Focus

What is overlooked by many is that while these two companies compete in VR hardware and software, their focus couldn’t be any more different.

Oculus is coming at virtual reality hardware from both sides: low-cost mass-market [to drive users] and high-end [to drive technology]. Only recently (with the reappearance of Valve) have people begun to question the second leg of that approach.

In the short to medium term, Oculus simply wants to develop the technology and to get enough people on-board. In the medium to long term, on behalf of Facebook, they want to explore other opportunities and to create an avenue for Metaverse based services over the Internet. To put it more amusingly: Facebook is looking to be the next Facebook before their core business starts to atrophy.

Valve is currently coming at it from the angle of PC gaming. (It is unclear where else, if anywhere, that their partner HTC may be wanting to go with this, but I suspect that they may have their own ambitions.) Valve/HTC is claming the high-end of the feature space, which goes hand-in-hand with the well-known “Glorious PC Gaming Master Race” schtick started by Zero Punctuation.

Really, they’re probably more looking just to be competitive… and to differentiate themselves. Did you see their announcement of a price premium? That helps support your opinion of Valve providing a superior solution, which works to Valve’s benefit almost as much as increasing the number of users. Judging by the reactions of VR enthusiasts, it was well received.

Valve’s mission of pushing PC gaming forward is something that protects and grows their Steam software distribution platform — they do not want to be marginalized by a single competitor which controls the market. That means that they need hardware. But that also drives their focus into the SteamVR/OpenVR middleware to support third party VR products. To date, they have not communicated any mention of ambitions in mobile VR or the Metaverse, but they’re not excluding it, either. To put it more amusingly: Steam is looking to be the next Steam.

Looking a little further out, I think that there is only so far that Valve can climb the product and technology tree before Oculus catches them and even surpasses them. The high profile recruitment and acquisitions of Oculus speak to this. Yet at some point, it may not matter to Valve, so long as they can entrench themselves as a platform for VR software distribution (and services).

Today, we have two companies that are looking to protect their legacy and they’re using virtual reality to project their existing business models into the future. Looking at the one space where they collide, which is PC gaming, in the short term there will be cooperation and competition.

Subtopic: PC Gaming

Oculus: The head start that Oculus has earned with their SDK means that there are going to be Oculus-only titles. There may also be publisher spill-over benefits with easier software ports into mass-market mobile VR. It is also good to be the owner of a PC-based Oculus solution because Valve will want to support your hardware in SteamVR. Why? Because they want to sell you games. Oculus may have started its focus on games, but long-term, it is unlikely to be the bread-and-butter for the company. Still, Oculus is going to have to try hard if they want to lose PC gaming.

Valve: Currently favored to steal the first-mover advantage in PC gaming, but that remains to be seen. They’ve introduced novel technology (Lighthouse tracking and room-scale VR) which means that they’ll have exclusive features which initially will only available through their hardware, but will be free for other hardware manufacturers to integrate. (We’ll have to see how well publishers target those unique features.) They have an enviable existing marketplace which will be tough to topple.

Ultimately, Valve doesn’t have to win the PC market as a whole, or even the high-end. They only need to offer and support choices (or, what some might spin it as “cause fragmentation”) with their own hardware and by supporting other VR hardware vendors. They need to prevent one company from monopolizing the space and cutting them out of software sales.

Summary

Are both companies on the right path? It would seem so. They’re just working towards different goals. Ultimately, we’re just caught in the middle, and you know what? I like it.

UPDATE:March 22nd, 2015 — I don’t know about Oculus, but I can confidently say that I’ve underestimated the scope of Valve’s efforts in Virtual Reality. I’ve spent the past two days pouring over public resources regarding their hardware. With the assistance of other users on Reddit, I believe that I’ve reversed-engineered some of their announced technology, and gained a solid insight into other pieces which have yet to be announced. I hope to share more about this with you soon.

UPDATE: March 20th, 2015 —Underscore_Talagan correctly pointed out that Valve is making their Lighthouse system free to integrate by third-party hardware manufacturers. This has now been noted and cited in the text above.

I collect full-sized arcade games. Most of my games are from the 1980s, but occasionally I’ll find something newer that I like and I’ll add it to the collection. Arguably, arcade games are a decent enough example of how forces conspire in us to choose when a consumer technology succeeds and when it fails. Of the many possible reasons, we’re going two focus on two: novelty and utility.

In the picture above, this arcade game had lost both its novelty and its utility. In the end, the only novelty it had left was to burn, and the only utility it had left to have its picture taken as part of a photo collection. The remaining pile of ashes had no significant novelty or utility to offer us.

The Dimension of Novelty

YouTube: 1983 Atari Star Wars Arcade Highscore Run

If you played arcade games in the 1980s, you’re going to relate very quickly to this example.

Why was this Star Wars game so popular? It had amazing high resolution three dimensional color vector graphics. It had digitized speech from the actual characters. It was based on events in the real Star Wars movie! So it had two cool new technologies from the period, and it was still very uncommon to see an arcade game with a movie tie-in. This game had novelty written all over it, and that was a good thing. It pulled you in and got you to play it.

After that, why did you keep playing the game? The gameplay was rock solid. It was fun and it was worth the entertainment value for the $.25 or $.50 per game that you might have paid. (You might have even paid a little more for the novelty of sitting in the cockpit version of the game.) Over time, you harvested the novelty that you had discovered and the rock solid gameplay offered very little negative incentive (other than the fact that it ate quarters) for you to stop playing.

For a game as awesome as this one, and this one was awesome, why did you ever stop playing it? Sure, some of them broke down and stopped working — those Amplifone vector monitors were a pretty strange technology in their day. But really, after a while, it lost its novelty. The gameplay continued to be rock solid, but you got used to the technology and the game. It didn’t wow you like it first did. It was still Star Wars, and that’s awesome, but the magic of playing the game was mostly gone. You’d still play it, though, if it was free.

What we’re describing is the decay of novelty. It might even be tied in to the concept of hedonic adaptation. No matter how great something is, it eventually becomes stale. We need something new, we need another dose of novelty to grab our attention.

YouTube: Atari The Empire Strikes Back Arcade Game Review

You better believe that Atari was already on top of this; their arcade division completely understood that novelty is a decaying resource. See the image above? It kind of looks like the previous image, but at the same time, it kind of looks different?

In 1985, Atari released a conversion kit which turned the Star Wars arcade game into Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Cool new songs and all new voices! Completely different gameplay! It even introduced a bonus system. Novelty had returned and you were entertained once again.

You plugged your quarters into the machine, but not as much as you did the original Star Wars vector graphics game. You were already acclimated to the idea of a Star Wars game with music, speech, and high resolution color vector graphics. No question, it was just as much a rock-solid game as the original, but your interest died off even sooner this time. You harvested a smaller amount of novelty than the first time, and when there was little novelty left, you went on to something else.

The Dimension of Utility

Beyond the entertainment of extracting all that novelty through twitch-oriented gameplay, you probably didn’t find much usefulness in the game. That is, it probably didn’t solve any real problems in your life. Maybe you won a bet with your little brother that you could beat his high score, and he had to do dishes for a week. But that experience isn’t very unique to this particular game.

You found no utility. When novelty was gone, there wasn’t any utility to fall back on. This piece of consumer technology, once a winner, now fails.

While you may never have found any utility in the game, someone else sure did — the arcade owner. Let’s look at this from his perspective. The Star Wars game, when properly put on location and maintained, was a constant stream of quarters. It also supported the attraction of customers to his establishment. The arcade owner was totally in it for the utility.

Image Source: A arcade game coin counter at Arcade Otaku forum

While he didn’t derive any real novelty to the game, he knew that you did. As your novelty declined, the weekly collections went down, and the game was less and less helpful in drawing customers into his establishment.

He had originally paid $2300 for the Star Wars game, and after a year of being on the floor, it wasn’t worth much to him now. People weren’t going to his establishment just to find this game, and fewer and fewer people are plugging quarters into it. He reduced the price from $.50 to $.25 and that squeezed a bit more life out of it.

Another year passed. The game was old. He knew that if he invested another $900 into a kit to upgrade it to The Empire Strikes Back, the game would regain much of its utility. That’s what he did. It didn’t quite have the same attraction as the original, but it was worth the cost of a refresh.

After some time, a bit quicker than the first time around, the game lost its novelty with players (and therefore, it lost its utility with the operator). It wasn’t drawing in any customers. Perhaps it was occupying floor space that more useful games could be using. Maybe it broke. He took it off the floor and put it in the back of his warehouse.

Novelty vs. Utility

Fast forward to the year 2001. The operator decides it is time to clear his warehouse. He decides to take his Star Wars arcade game to auction. He’s lucky — the game still works. What is the game worth, to who, and why?

Source: An arcade auction by American Amusement Auctions

A vintage arcade game derives its value at auction from two sources:

1] Utility. What an operator is willing to pay for a machine that could generate revenue, draw more customers, or be used for parts. Let’s say $50.

2] Novelty. What a collector would pay to have this in his home. Often, this form of novelty is actually nostalgia, which is novelty that returns years after a significant novelty event has passed. Call it $800.

Some games (like this one), because of the age and unique technology, have high novelty and low utility. Why? It may be perceived by operators as difficult to maintain. As well, even if it had a nominal utility value, it could be far exceeded by the novelty value.

Some games (like Pac-Man) have both high utility and high novelty. They still make money for arcade game operators and they still are highly prized by collectors. Despite being one of the most common arcade games, Pac-Man (and Ms. Pac-Man) are also one of the higher priced vintage games today.

Modern games tend to have a higher utility to operators than they have novelty to collectors. Some games have neither novelty nor utility (a game like Super X). Despite being very rare, it has almost no novelty and almost no utility. In this case, uniqueness and rarity are not novelty or utility. Nobody cares. Of those games, the lucky ones are converted into a more valuable title, or they are set ablaze and have their images posted to Flickr.

Beyond Vintage Arcade Games

We can also look at the success and failure of other consumer technologies in terms of novelty and utility.

Seven years is a very long life for a first person shooter. Why has the PC version of Team Fortress 2, a game introduced in 2007, not yet failed? Valve continued to refresh the title at no additional cost, and they actively maintained the novelty. Later, they change to a free-to-play (F2P) model. When the game went F2P, the negative incentives (specifically: a high initial cost) were reduced, so the game was able to continue to attract players new players at lower levels of novelty.

I had an interesting anecdote to share about the TF2 development process, and how a series of both positive and negative changes each managed to increase player participation. I couldn’t source an article for this, but I was reminded that what I was describing sounded similar to the Hawthorne Effect (or probably more precisely, the Novelty Effect). If both a positive stimulation and a negative simulation could increase productivity (or engagement) in the short term, perhaps novelty itself is the cause.

A posting at The Shamanic Economist suggests that novelty may be a hidden factor in sales and also in investments. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least make a mention of the recent $3M investment in the Virtuix Omni treadmill.) Is it time that investors, product manufacturers, sellers, and consumers directly acknowledge novelty as a (desired) product feature?

Beyond novelty, and back to the topic of Team Fortress 2, it also managed to generate a bit of utility. The Workshop allowed players to design new assets which could potentially be sold in-game. The Marketplace allowed players to buy and sell in-game items for Steam wallet credit that could be used to buy other games. TF2 maintained novelty and added utility, and that has kept Team Fortress 2 alive.

Image Source: 512 Pixels article “The Macintosh that Saved Apple”

When I look at modern Apple products, I see don’t see a casual orchestration of novelty and utility. I see an intentional management of the two. The practice at Apple became most apparent with its iMac G3 desktop and has been easy to follow in the company’s products ever since.

Apple works hard to maintain novelty. When novelty can’t be maintained, utility holds the package together. (When both of those become weak, perhaps price becomes the key.) Does Apple owe its product management, in part, to the years that Steve Jobs spent in Atari’s arcade division?

What other consumer products come to mind that have succeeded or failed? How did they rate in terms of novelty and utility? What about the goat simulator? What would make it have long-term appeal?

How does the decay of novelty relate to for-pay downloadable game content? Do automobile manufacturers intentionally maintain a small but constant treadmill of novelty and utility enhancements in their products?

Back to the Metaverse

Image Source: Reuters pulls out of Second Life, reporter calls the game boring

Historically, implementations of virtual worlds have focused on novelty. They offer new places to explore. Hopefully, they try to refresh their technologies. Second Life strikes me as a great example of a virtual world which is full of novelty. That’s a problem.

In order to retain users, the technology isn’t being refreshed fast enough, and the stimulus of new sights doesn’t come quick enough. If a user gets hooked, what is there to keep them around? When hedonic adaptation kicks in, the supply of new stimulation runs dry. Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Second Life is boring“, even though there are plenty of things to do. Now you know why.

Now, it is unfair to say that Second Life is pure novelty. It has utility; a select few have found real uses inside of virtual worlds. They might design 3D models, or sell virtual goods. Some subcultures have found a place to thrive there. These people stick with Second Life because they still have utility after most of the novelty is depleted. For them, Second Life has succeeded. I should also acknowledge that novelty and utility have different thresholds for different audiences.

Perhaps in this context, we might better understand trolls and griefers. Once they have exhausted novelty, and they have no utility at risk, do these people find ways to generate their own novelty (at the expense of other users)? Can we deter casual griefers by keeping them engaged?

In Closing

In The measure of a Metaverse, I argued that virtual worlds should be judged on utility (in terms of its impact and influence and what you can actually accomplish with it). Today, I’d still make that same argument, but with a different slant. Keeping up with the hedonic treadmill for novelty may be possible, but is likely unsustainable for most virtual worlds. Once the magic fades and you’re only left with small impulses of novelty, you have to rely on utility to keep people engaged.

As you are building a new virtual world, be thinking about the amount of effort you are spending up-front on cutting edge technology and hyper-realism. At first, yes, it can pull in a lot of new users. Months and years down the road, will you be able to keep up with the decay of novelty? For how long? Look at utility and useful applications as the way to sustain your users.

Update 04/26/2014 – I came across an article on Reddit that was originally published in April 2012, before the successful Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift. Reality Crumbles: Whatever happened to VR? If you are interested, head on over and read it. I think it comes to a similar conclusion on what killed VR the first time around: the decay of novelty.

What kind of metrics can we use to measure the success of a Metaverse?

We could measure the users. How many are there? How happy are they? How engaged? How long they stay? How much content they are consuming and creating? Something like like deviantART might measure and compare their success in these terms.

Conventional wisdom is that Second Life is a failure. But that all depends on how you measure success. Did Second Life take over the world? No. When it hit critical mass, was it able to capitalize on it? No. Is the business a going concern? Yes! They’re still in business, and they’re still bringing in new users, even if there is still an 80% churn rate in their new subscriber retention numbers. A publicly traded company that answers to shareholders might find that situation intolerable. For a private company, that might just be okay.

We can see that we can measure the success of a Metaverse is with business metrics. Do you have a reliable revenue stream? Are you able to capture revenue? Is the business growing? Are you going to be able to maximize your value and sell out to a larger concern?

When I look at Second Life, I see communication, self-expression, and exploration as three major goals that were strongly built into its design. But despite all of this, is there really much to do there? For most people, the answer is no. Why? The reason is that Second Life is too inwardly focused. How? Let me show you.

Activities in Second Life include sightseeing in Second Life, talking to people in Second Life, buying customizations for your avatar in Second Life, buying and populating property in Second Life, selling virtual goods and property in Second Life, playing simple games in Second Life. You see the connection that flows through all of these examples, right? They’re all inside of Second Life. They’re isolated from the real world.

What you do inside of Second Life has little impact on the real world (yes, there are exceptions). This isn’t just an issue of critical mass. When IBM set up shop in Second Life, could I go there to evaluate and then pay for a real laptop? Could I enter a technical support ticket for a device driver? Apply for a job? No, I couldn’t do any of those things in any plausible way beyond opening up an external web page. The reason for this was that Second Life is almost entirely divorced from the real-world, except for the people who inhabit it. It was like it was built with a meatspace firewall.

When American Apparel set up shop in Second Life, they got some publicity, sold some virtual t-shirts which only exist inside of Second life, and that’s about it. They weren’t able to directly translate their investment into sales. Is it any wonder that when the Second Life boom came in 2007, it went away as quickly as it came? What happens in Second Life stays in Second Life.

So here is my measure of a Metaverse: impact and influence; what you can actually accomplish. A Metaverse is successful in the degree that it is able to make an impact on the real world, be it material or influential. A Metaverse with a design goal of impact should be connected to real-world systems. I should be able to browse American Apparel t-shirts in the Metaverse and then actually buy them in real life from inside the Metaverse. I should be able to check on the status of my order. I should be able to make my voice heard to others and let them know how wonderful or how terrible those t-shirts were.

Source: Screenshot of pizzahut.com from 1994 via the adafruit blog

There was a time when the Internet didn’t have any significant real-world impact. Then, one day, ordering a pizza online was a very geeky yet amazing thing that you could do. In the novel Ready Player One, the author described a scene where two people in two different locations could sit in a virtual pizza parlor, order a pizza, and talk. They would order a real-world pizza which would be delivered, based on their preset preferences, to their front door. They would share a real-world pizza as they talked to each other online. Isn’t that where we should be heading?

I’m interested to hear what you think is important. What do you think? Should there be an ultimate goal and the ultimate measure of a Metaverse? What should we be baking into the design?